- Google Cloud suspended Railway account after suspicious activity
- The multi-hour outage affected all rail workloads across all clouds.
- Railway takes charge of inspection due to technical dependency
Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company Railway has accused Google Cloud of abruptly suspending its account without notice, causing an hours-long outage.
The company, which has more than three million users hosting around 10 million services, APIs and databases, identified an issue around 10:20 pm UTC on May 19, 2026, which was only fully rectified about eight hours later at 6:14 am
While the company determined the cause and sought to restore services, customers were subject to errors such as “no healthy upstream,” “unconditional drop overload,” login failures, and inability to access the dashboard.
Technical dependence eventually caused the railroad to be discontinued.
Because the Network Control Plane API was affected (which is hosted on Google Cloud), all Railway workloads across all clouds were affected, resulting in 503 and 404 errors. Existing workloads remained running for about 15 minutes before caches began to expire.
The Registry reports that Railway spends an eight-figure sum each year on Google Cloud (potentially more than $1 million each month), even after having moved parts of its infrastructure to colocation services after the problems of 2024 and 2025.
Railway claims that it took almost an hour for Google Cloud to interact after the incident occurred. “We are furious and still trying to get all the details,” said solutions engineer Angelo Saraceno. It’s worth noting that the account was reactivated at 10:29 p.m., just nine minutes after the problems began.
The company has since published a detailed blog post revealing everything it knows about the incident, along with information from Google Cloud.
The report confirms that the outage was part of a broader automated sweep by Google that affected other Google Cloud Platform accounts without warning. TechRadar Pro has learned that Google Cloud identified an increase in abusive activity, particularly cryptocurrency mining, across a large number of accounts, and that it had previously warned affected users about suspicious activity and potential bans as a result.
Exclusive dependency is a bad idea
Railway has taken full ownership of its oversight and announced immediate changes, including removing exclusive reliance on the GCP network plane API.
“If any of the interconnections go down, there is always a path through the clouds,” explained support engineer Chandrika Khanduri and general manager of agent experience Cody De Arkland.
“We have invested in resilience as a result of previous incidents that have helped us cope with the impact,” the company added, hinting at previous problems. Although it promises to have learned from previous mistakes, it was ultimately Railway’s responsibility to remove its exclusive dependence on GCP, which could have avoided a widespread impact this time.
“Your customers don’t care if the failure was Google or Railway; they see your product. Their uptime is our responsibility and we will continue to deliver,” the company concluded.
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